The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to controlling a backlight module, and more particularly, to a dimming control apparatus and method for generating a dimming control signal by referring to distribution information (e.g., histogram information) or multiple characteristic values derived from pixel values.
In a conventional liquid crystal display (LCD) apparatus, a light source of a backlight module is commonly implemented by fluorescent tube(s). Due to the advance of the LCD technology, a partially-driven backlight module is developed, where a number of point light sources, such as light emitting diodes (LEDs), are used in a plurality of backlight units implemented for illuminating a plurality of regions of a display panel, respectively and independently. Therefore, the light intensity of the backlight module is partially changed rather than globally changed, which can improve the display quality of the video image.
Thus, as the dimming control (e.g., a local dimming control) of the backlight module would affect the final display quality of the video image, how to properly control the backlight module becomes an important topic to designers in this field.